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Project
Back to the Future: Future expectations and actions in late medieval and early modern Europe, c.1400-c.1830 (Back2theFuture). (Back2theFuture)
From the eighteenth century onwards, the future was considered as open, uncertain and constructible – the way we tend to
perceive the future today. In contrast, early modern Europeans believed that the future was beyond the control of man. The
aim of this project is to challenge such grand narratives on past futures, which are generally highly linear and focused on
modernity, have a fuzzy chronology and thin empirical base, biased by learned text. Moreover, these hypotheses fail to do
justice to the presence and interplay of various (multi)temporalities and do not link future expectations to the concrete
actions of men and women in the past. Most historians simply ignore the topic, since past futures are extremely hard to find
in the written record. Hence, they focus on the actions of men and women in the past rather than their motivations.
To gain more insight in how people in the past thought about the future and how this affected their actions, this project draws
on a highly innovative combination of close and distant reading methods of more than 15,000 letters written in (varieties of)
Italian, German, French, Dutch and English by and to European merchants in the period 1400-1830. These practical
documents enable us to reconstruct different types of future thinking of these merchants and to assess how these thoughts
powered their actual behaviour. Better still, they also shed light on the future expectations of their non-merchant
correspondents: their wives, children and other family members, clerks, clergy, nobles, craftsmen, etc. A comparative
analysis of the letters from these different social groups, written in several languages, in a variety of European regions and
during distinct moments, allows us to identify the impact/speed of potential agents of change that loom large in the literature
(capitalism, the Reformation, probability calculus, and the Enlightenment) more carefully. With this methodology, we will be
able to provide fine-grained explanations.
Date:1 Feb 2020 → Today
Keywords:MEDIEVAL HISTORY, EARLY MODERN HISTORY, FUTURE EXPECTATIONS
Disciplines:Historiography, Historical theory and methodology not elsewhere classified, Cultural history, Early modern history, European history, Medieval history, Socio-economic history